The other reading

Saint Paul to the Romans 5:1-5

Therefore, since we have been justified in faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have have gained access by faith to this grace in which we stand, and we boast in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we boast of our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven character, and proven character, hope, and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

As always with Paul, there is an immense amount packed into the sentences. One of the things packed in is how terribly important virtue is to Saint Paul. To read Saint Paul as saying how we act doesn't matter is to seriously misread him. (Even more problematically, it is to read him in a  way that cannot be reconciled with large sections of the Bible, including the Gospels and other letters.)

In any case:

Take your afflictions as a good,
and you will develop endurance,
and endurance will given you a proven character,
and a proven character will give you hope.

Faith, is a way of living. Faith is never alone because you cannot have faith without actions.

E.P. Sanders says somewhere that James misunderstood Paul but overlooks the possibility that James may have been responding to others who misunderstood Paul. Or even that Paul needed to learn from James before he could know what to really say. In any case, there are many around today who misunderstand Paul. In sola fide the fide is right and the sola is wrong.

Worse than wrong, really, it's meaningless and useless. You cannot know you have faith without action. Go ahead, have faith as strong as you can with out actions. What does this mean. Are you scrunching up your forehead? Sorry, that is action. When Luther added "alone" after faith, he did nothing at all. That word means nothing whatsoever in that context.



A digression: It's often seemed to me that the same concern applies to "Q". That there were other sources, of course, but there is no good reason to assume just one other source. That Matthew and Luke both drew on additional sources is a trivial point of little profound significance. It is only by making Q into a single source that scholars make him or her seem terribly important. But there is no reason to assume that. In fact, the most likely explanation by far is that both Luke and Matthew were drawing on a common understanding shared among early Christians.

But to admit that would be to deflate the balloons of an awful lot of scholars.